A ship sinks, a reef grows

Friday

The Jane Yarn, a 63-foot steel-hulled research vessel, made its last voyage Thursday, bobbing merrily on a tow line behind a tug boat 18 miles off the coast.

There it sank.

That was the whole idea. The ship will become the structure for an artificial reef created by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources at a spot called J reef.

It will be a boon for recreational divers and sport fishermen, said Paul Medders, spokesman for the Coastal Resources Division of the Department of Natural Resources.

"The structures are artificial," he said. "What forms on them is perfectly natural."

Savannah Marine readied the vessel by installing two 12-inch valves in its hull. Workers positioned the Jane Yarn about 100 yards upcurrent from its desired resting place and pulled the plugs.

Slowly it drank in sea water. Then, after about 50 minutes, its stern dropped and its bow stood up.

With a geyser of water gushing out its nose, it bubbled out of sight.

An aid in research

The Jane Yarn was the first research vessel at Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary. It is named after Jane Hurt Yarn, a Georgian who was instrumental in getting President Jimmy Carter to designate Gray's Reef a National Marine Sanctuary.

The early environmentalist also worked to see that Wassaw, Egg and Wolf islands received National Wildlife Refuge status and to see that the state purchase Ossabaw Island.

Cathy Sakas, the education coordinator at Gray's Reef, spent many hours on the ship, living aboard it for days at a time in 1999 and 2000 while she made research dives on the reef.

On Thursday, Sakas was among a small group of divers who were the first to visit the ship 72 feet beneath the Atlantic.

"She landed perfectly," Sakas said. "She couldn't have been sitting any prettier on the bottom than she was."

Although its sailing days are over, the Jane Yarn may yet be a boon to researchers.

Danny Gleason, a biology professor at Georgia Southern University, studies invertebrates at Gray's Reef and at the state's artificial reefs. He sees the newly sunken ship as an opportunity to examine how natural the communities are on artificial structures.

"It would be interesting to see if the artificial reef out there is reflective of what we see on natural substrate," he said. "Do we get the same sequence of species replacement?"

It won't take long to find out.

Fish started snooping around the vessel almost as soon as the sand settled. The coral, sponges, sea squirts and mossy bryozoans that Gleason studies won't be far behind.

"I'd expect to see things very soon," he said. "When we put things out a week they start getting critters settling on them."

Criticism for reef programs

The ship joins an eclectic assortment of vehicles, including tanks, New York City subway cars and two Liberty ships that make up the 22 artificial reefs off Georgia.

Not everyone loves this recycling program.

The nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, for one, opposes the creation of new reefs for fishing or tourism. Such reefs "tend to concentrate fish unnaturally, making them more vulnerable to overfishing," it says in its online policy statement. "In some cases, they introduce toxins and other pollutants into the ocean."

A spokesman for Oceana, another nonprofit ocean advocacy group, is not convinced about overfishing but agrees with concerns about pollution.

"The objections I've heard are there hasn't been enough research about what happens to the constituent elements of the ship," said campaign director David Allison. "It's going to corrode. What does that do to fish, to the people who end up eating the fish?"

The Jane Yarn was stripped of fuel, asbestos and other potentially harmful substances before it was sunk, Medders said. Valuable items, such as the brass fittings around its portholes, also were removed.

DNR paid Savannah Marine about $10,000 to ready the ship for its new role as a reef.

DNR sinks two or three ships a year to serve as artificial reefs.

"They are put in places where there's not anything else but sand," Medders said. "In general, their footprint is small. It's not junk stacked on top of junk out there."

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